The Shift highlights women's stories through the lens of impact. It hopes to contexualize history and inspire action.
It’s a crisp fall day on East 73rd Street in New York City, the sun illuminating the tall windows of Gloria Steinem’s second-story living room. The feminist icon is settled in a wide, red armchair, telling a story. At the end of this very block, there was once a women’s clinic. Women would drive up in old cars, many from far away, finally arriving at a place where they could receive a safe abortion. Steinem would watch, the street visible from this room.
This space, all warm wood and eclectic, colorful nods to Steinem’s work and travels, is the stuff of legend—a gathering place where she and other influential women involved in the second-wave feminist movement brought new ideas to life. If there is a single, standout leader of that movement, Steinem, a prolific journalist and author, speaker, political activist, and organizer, is that leader. Among her many contributions to the advancement of women: she co-founded the media juggernaut that was Ms. magazine, which sold out of its print run of 300,000 copies in just days when it officially launched in 1972—the year after she, along with leaders including The Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan, pioneering Black congresswoman and presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, and congresswoman Bella Abzug, co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus. With Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan, Steinem also created the Women’s Media Center in 2005 to expand the visibility and influence of women in the news and narratives we consume. She was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 by then-President Barack Obama and the Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum in 2019.
Today, the 90-year-old icon has her mind on the ongoing presidential race, and the possibility that, for the first time, her vote may be counted toward the successful election of a woman to the country’s highest office.
For the inaugural issue of The Shift, a new publication focused on women’s impact, we spoke to Steinem about the changes she’s seen in the feminist movement since the 1970s, the crucial importance of reproductive rights, and the value of laughter in revolution.
If you don't vote, you don't exist. You don't have your opinion recorded in local elections or in national elections. There's really nothing that's more important. And when you consider how long women and people of color fought for the vote, we can see how crucial it is.
Yes. A lot of us imagined Hillary Clinton as president. A lot of us imagined Shirley Chisholm as president. Those are the two most obvious ones. But there were so many women who could and should have been—Patsy Mink, Bella Abzug. We've been wasting, or not using, half the talent in the country.
We started out so long ago campaigning for a woman for president—I mean, the first woman ran on the free love ticket in the 1800s—it's kind of amazing to me that when we look at the current race, there's not much pointing out that pretty much every other democracy in the world has had a female leader, and that Kamala would be our first.
We can help Kamala Harris achieve lasting change by paying attention to our local elections too, and making sure that women of all races are equally included, so it's not just a one-off at the top, but it's a deep, democratic change that continues.
We each need to have authority over our own bodies. We get to say what happens to our physical selves. But there has been a continuous effort to take the reproductive decision away from the person in whose body it [concerns]. Imagine if only someone else could decide your medical care or your dental care—it's such a dangerous and disempowering tradition.
One of the most frequent ways that abortion is restricted is by making it seem shameful or like something people don't talk about. And therefore, from the very beginning of the [second] wave of the women's movement, there was a movement called ‘I have had an abortion.’ Actually, it was international—it was women in France who started that, and we, in Ms. magazine, published huge lists of women who said, I have had an abortion, and I demand that it be safe and legal.
We have never been able to completely depend on old white guys to support our freedoms, whatever they were—for the vote, for reproduction, whatever. Our bodies are ours. We get to make the decision. And: I have had an abortion. It's still important to say that.
Shop The Look
The focus on women's media is perhaps not as surprising or strong as it was when we were starting Ms. magazine and people thought we were writing about multiple sclerosis.
Women have become part of the media. There are female reporters at the New York Times, which was not the case in the beginning of my memory. In fact, we took roses to a New York Times editor who hired the first woman at a high level and who also stopped [the paper from] identifying women by their marital status—I had been “Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.” We took him roses and thanked him. And he said the most annoying thing. He said, Well, if I'd known it mattered so much to you, I would have done it long ago.
The beginning of Ms. magazine was a special section in New York magazine. I was an editor there, and I had a column. So when we started Ms., we did it as an enclosure in an issue of New York. Then we, the authors, went out around the country to talk on radio or do whatever we could to tell people to look for it on the newsstand, and it sold out in eight days. I remember calling back to the magazine office in a panic from California saying, “They can't find it—it never got here,” and discovering that, yes, it had gotten there—and sold out.
White feminism is a contradiction in terms, unless you are factually talking about a particular group of white women. But feminism has no restrictive adjectives. Men can be feminists, and many are. Women, girls, Hispanic, Latinas, African Americans. It's a state of belief in equality that anyone can share.
It's hard to generalize, but to begin at the beginning, which is men who are becoming fathers, there are many more men who are equal parents and are not assigning all of the child care duties—and joys—to women in their lives or in their employ. Men ask for parental leave too, because men are and should always be regarded as equal in parenthood.
I don't remember—I’ve shut it out.
Well, it has changed a lot. I remember early on, I had been working as a freelance writer at a particular magazine, and we were becoming active on issues of abortion and political office and so on. And a man I knew—a friend, a very smart, nice guy—called me up and said, “Gloria, I didn't know you were lesbian.”
Shop The Look
No, it doesn't happen anymore. Especially because, in a deep way, many men have become more responsible for their own infants and small children and students—the young people, male and female, in their lives—because there's that empathy, a family empathy. It's been very helpful in building it outward into society.
The task is not to be hostile, because we've all been in states of different levels of knowledge, but to say in an empathetic way, this is actually much bigger, and this could affect your life in an even more positive way.
Yes, I suppose that people in social justice movements altogether, whether it was the civil rights movement or the feminist movement, have been regarded as uniformly angry when actually they're being suitably and specifically angry at what discriminates. So it's probably especially helpful to have feminists and humanists who are poets, who are lyricists, who are comics. Laughter is crucial—it’s actually the only emotion that can't be compelled. You can make people afraid. You can even make them feel they're in love; if they're dependent for long enough, they bond with their oppressor. But you can't make them laugh if they don't want to.
With my friends, of course. Reading. Watching Dance Moms.
This space belongs to you too. We can hold up to 20 people. We have all kinds of meetings here.
Yes, I'm amazed. I don't know how it happened. I did go online and try to locate the oldest woman in the world so I would have someone as a role model. But it's probably a mistake to try to predict, because it keeps you from the spontaneity that means you're really seeing what's going on.